Rocket engineer Arnie Sodergren walked up a driveway strewn with weeds and through the open door of a dilapidated, concrete building on a rocky hillside. Except for the sound of his feet shuffling through broken ceiling tiles and other rubble on the floor, all was quiet. He stopped in the middle of a bare room. "Wernher von Braun used to stand where I am standing now," said Sodergren, 62.

Lockheed Corp. and Rocketdyne have proposed a radical, reusable wedged-shaped spacecraft with rocket engines to lift it into orbit and return in one piece, and which could by next decade replace the current space shuttle and the country's fleet of expendable rockets.

Employees of Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory are unaccustomed to seeing a bower of roses and a five-piece rock band where they test-fire the rocket engines that power the space shuttle. But they are not accustomed to having weddings there either. On Friday, quality assurance engineer Deborah (Debbie) Peterson and engineering specialist Joseph (Joe) Koncel exchanged vows just above the flame bucket on the grill of a steel testing tower known familiarly as "Alfa 3."

SpaceX has delayed its historic rocket launch to the International Space Station yet again. The launch date, which has been pushed back several times already, is now set for May 19. The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., was slated to blast off May 7 from Cape Canaveral , Fla., in a demonstration flight for NASA . Three or four days after launch, the company is set to make history if it docks with...

Bud Benner, 74, had worked on tough jobs before the Apollo moon project, helping to design the X-15 rocket plane that flew at six times the speed of sound. But the race to the moon was at another level of human endeavor. Assistant chief engineer at North American Aviation in Downey, Benner was grappling with one of the smallest pieces of the Apollo project and perhaps the most complex: the command module.

White-hot acetylene torches bite into the steel bones of the abandoned hulk known as Vertical Test Stand-1, cutting apart the rusted cradle of American rocketry. Rocketdyne is demolishing this relic of the Cold War and the space race. Not because it cares little for history, but because it needs to save money. U.S. scientists of the 1950s and '60s labored feverishly here at Rocketdyne's Santa Susana Field Laboratory, testing prototype rocket engines that they prayed could beat the Soviets.

Boeing has fallen seven months behind schedule and is facing mounting costs on its revolutionary engine for the X-33 rocket plane, an experimental vehicle at the heart of NASA's effort to develop a low-cost reusable space launcher, the government disclosed Tuesday. The setback was caused by technical difficulties in bonding key high-temperature engine parts at Boeing's Rocketdyne facility in Canoga Park, where the X-33's novel linear aerospike engine is being built.

Early tests show that a new rocket engine design will eliminate the flaws that caused the space shuttle Challenger to blow up, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration official said Monday. John Thomas, manager of NASA's solid rocket motor redesign team, also said the space agency is on track toward a resumption of space flights in early 1988.